Stand As a Witness

Hey everyone!!! Man, life is good, am I right? The Christmas season is here are we are having so many good things happen in the world. People are feeling the love!! The Christmas spirit I should say. Anyways, this week was different but awesome. We had lots of good things happen in the mission!! A few people from the mission headquarters in Salt Lake came down to the mission for three days to train us on what we could do better as missionaries!! It was legit! The best part was, each of those three days, someone came out with us to do missionary stuff to help us apply what we had been learning. It was a good time. 

Day 2 was probably the most impactful for me. It was entirely centered on using the scriptures more in your teaching, using them as the foundation of a lesson rather than the “ornaments” as they described it. It was awesome. That night we had a dinner with a member named Jonathan. He is a great guy, he served a mission as well, and he is probably one of the nicest people I have ever met!! We had our mission president, President Christensen, out with us for the night and we shared a scripture with him on helping others, and he shared with us tons of struggles he has had in his life, and some he currently struggles with now. We asked him to come teach a lesson with us this week, and he was super excited!! It was cool to see the power that can come from using the scriptures to teach instead of teaching and using scriptures every now and then. Good stuff.

Funny experience...so, when you think of missionaries, you think of how they run after people to teach them the gospel, right? Well, in most cases that isn’t true, because most people will run AWAY from you if they see two dudes running towards them. However, last night there was an exception. We had just had a great dinner, and we had gotten in our car when we saw this guy walking down the street, and we felt like we should talk to him. It was a very STRONG thought, so there was no denying that it was going to happen. By the time we were out of the car he had walked past us and had headphones in, so we were calling out to him to no avail. So, we decided to book it after him until we were close enough to make it seem natural. Despite our attempts, there was nothing natural about it. We ran up closer to him, and he stopped to grab something on the ground, and he saw us running after him...awkward? Totally. We saved it though. Turns out this guy is the nicest man in the world. He wants to go to the Christmas Lights with us!!! Miracles are happening. 

Love you all! I love the gospel, I love the Savior, and I love the peace that comes from Him!! Have a great week everyone!!

Elder Barlow
Sorry, no pics this week. 

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